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PayPal Email Scam Example

Recently, in 2013, I got an email with the subject “PayPal , We need your help !”. The sender said “Paypal”, so I opened it, because it looked like a legitimate email and made it’s way in my Gmail inbox.

When I opened the email here is a picture of what it looked like:

PayPal Email Scam Example Picture

The Paypal Phishing Email escaped my Spam folder

The interesting thing about this email is the fact that it escaped Gmail’s spam filters and did not end up in the SPAM folder for whatever reason. And, the alert message that is displayed in the email was actually displayed 2 hours after I first opened the email message – when I first opened that message, Gmail did not display the red warning message, so I almost thought that it was a real message.

How I realized the email was a fraud

When I read the email the first thing I noticed was sent from an intermediate third party email provider – juno.clearmedia.be. That seemed strange and very unlikely that PayPal would send an email using a third party email provider like Juno. And then, of course, the email states that recently PayPal contacted me saying that there was a problem with my account – but I did not remember that ever happening, so at that point I was sure that this email was a scam. There are also some obvious grammatical errors in the email – something a huge company like PayPal would never send without having some editors look through the text.

If you actually visit the website in the email (which we do NOT recommend) you will see a website that actually looks a lot like the PayPal.com website. But, the devil is in the details and the footer of the website has links that go nowhere different, but actually stay on the same page. So, the fraudsters clearly were too lazy to do everything correctly, which is another clue that the website is clearly a phishing website that is just trying to get you to enter in your PayPal email address and password so that they can steal your details, and eventually steal your money!